Slashdot Mirror
NYSE Goes To Linux
Aligrip writes "It appears that IBM has convinced the folks at the Securities Industry Automation Corp (SIAC) to move their entire trading network to Linux as explained in this article in the Investors Business Daily. The authors predict that this deal could give Linux "a hot new beachhead with financial institutions". Cool!"
NYSE is supported by SIAC, not SAIC. SAIC is "Science Applications International Corporation".
With NYSE making this move, it's very likely that AMEX, NSCC & GSCC will eventually make this move as well, since they are all supported by SIAC.
- Former SIAC consultant
It pains me to say this but it probably won't matter much what OS is underneath the trading software (except for performance gains etc...) because I doubt the traders ever see the OS at all. It's great PR for linux, but like all PR wins it will probably be short lived. I wouldn't expect traders to wake up each day and say to themselves "Self, I'm using Linux at work. That's neat." It just won't happen...
As for the distribution that would be used, I doubt that matters much either...
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
"A" big company? I'm currently doing some work for a recruiting company mostly dealing with Wall Street giants, and every job description I've seen from them for tech jobs has Linux as a requirement (along with Perl/Java/Sybase etc.). They're all happily using Linux for their non-mission critical needs (which makes sense, since they have one UNIX or another running on the mission critical equipment), but, as someone once pointed out in a Slashdot article, they don't make a big fuss over it because they consider it a "competitive advantage".
A few weeks ago our system (which handles 70% of all the trades sent to NASDAQ) accidentally sent too many position updates to NASDAQ, something like 200 per second for 20 seconds, and all on a test stock. Not that many, and well within the spec that NASDAQ tells us to stay within, but it crashed NASDAQ's Small Order Execution System (SOES) for all stocks for 20 minutes.
NASDAQ was mad at us for sending so many positions, but it was really their fault for not being able to handle a volume of traffic that they publish that they can handle.
I can't tell you if the part of NASDAQ that crashed is handled by their new NT stuff, or if it was the older Solaris and Tandem parts. But it makes me think that if the tech stock bubble hadn't burst when it did, NASDAQ would have quickly run out of steam and melted down under the shear pressure of increasing trading volumes.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Sure Linux is seriously eating into proprietary Unix market share, but think about it a little more carefully. These guys are looking for something that's cheaper and easier to deploy than the Sun boxes they're currently using. Without Linux, the only choices are 1)eat the costs and stick with Unix, 2)port to Windows (also at considerable expense).
The breadth of offerings available for Linux (cheap 1U boxes, Mainframe LPARS, massive servers) make it a natural choice for people who might otherwise leave the Unix world altogether. It's easy to port from Unix to Linux, and you can run your app. on any hardware imaginable.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow